What is a frame?

[Gebruiker2000]

What is a frame on a website? Can someone show me an example, please?
And what is the exact reason that Google can't crawl this kind of things?

[J. H. Rasmussen]

First, you would likely get more replies, asking this question in the coding sub-forum: http://www.v7n.com/forums/coding-forum/

A frameset is a way to split up a webpage, in forexample 3 pages on the same page as my example below. A iframe is often used to display content on a webpage from another webpage, forexample advertisements or youtube videos.

Anyway, a website using frames, usually relies on all the frames being present. So the website would most likely not work or have a limited amount of features if a user just viewed the url of one of these frames.

Lets say, the website have 3 frames, a top frame where it displays some advertisement, a left frame with some navigation links and a right frame with some content. When the user clicks a link in the left frame, another page is displayed in the right frame. Lets say, the ad-frames url is http://www.domain.com/ad.html, navigation frames url is http://www.domain.com/menu.html and the right frames url is http://www.domain.com/content.html.

Now, if Googlebot indexed those frame urls and an user found one of these frame urls in the search results, and clicked on it. Then the user would only see either a menu with no frame to display the content in and no advertisement(the site would die, since it don't make money ;-)), a advertisement with no navigation, or other content or some content without navigation or advertisement. So crawlers only index the page containing the frameset, so the page looks correct.

So we can conclude, it would be no problem for crawlers to index those frame urls, it's just a very very bad idea, so thats why the don't do it. And it's usually a bad idea in general to use framesets, because crawlers don't index the urls of the individual frames ;-)

[Anton Zaleski]

A good explanation, I'd say. Hardly anything to add
Frames were a trend about a dozen years ago. Okay, maybe not trend, but many beginner web designers were taught to make frames-based sites then. I sometimes surf across such mammoths, BTW.

[blogfreakz]

Why should Google not like frames? Frames are normal html-pages. Only the frameset looks different, but without problems in ranking. The only disadvantage on framesets is the invisibility in Google-cache-version. On the other hand they have a big advantage, the noframe-area.

[J. H. Rasmussen]

Originally Posted by blogfreakz

Why should Google not like frames?

Because of the reasons i provided above.

Originally Posted by blogfreakz

Frames are normal html-pages.

Yep, normal html-pages, that normal crawlers don't index. I'm not saing, that you could not somehow make a crawler index those frame-pages, but if they did, and a user clicked on that search result, they would have the problem that i discribet above.

Originally Posted by blogfreakz

Only the frameset looks different, but without problems in ranking.

Really? Ofcause you can rank the frameset-page, it's just much much more difficult than if you didn't use frames.

Originally Posted by blogfreakz

The only disadvantage on framesets is the invisibility in Google-cache-version.

Normally, a crawler only index the page with the frameset, and if you look at that Google cached page, i can't see why you wouldn't see the frames, unless the website prevents it(eg. hot-link protection).

Originally Posted by blogfreakz

On the other hand they have a big advantage, the noframe-area.

Well, the frameset-page can't know what frame is currently displayed in the frames, so if the menu-frame have links to 10 different pages, that can be displayed in the content frame, then you would have to use some very general SEO on the frameset page, to cover all the individual frames content. I wouldn't call that a big advantage, but it's better than nothing, but not better than not using framesets.

[Rajnish357]

I think you are saying about iFrame you can get deatils info here with examples w3schools.com/tags/tag_iframe.asp

[williamxaviers]

Still now many websites are designed almost with the frames, in-spite of the fact that search engine makes a less crawling into the website making a less chance of indexing, but if there are more than two or three pages in the website, then every page should not contain the frames.